Published two weeks ago, but only just arrived on the amazon.co.uk
website (& still missing from the amazon.com site, alas):
RALPH HAWKINS
The MOON, The Chief Hairdresser (highlights)
110 pages, Ł8.95 / $13.95
ISBN 0-907562-42-6
This is Ralph Hawkins’ first full-length collection in some years and
brings one of the most startlingly original voices of his generation
back before the poetry public. Besides the title collection, this
volume contains the Pushkin poems, which have hitherto only been
available in pamphlet form, and two further new sequences, Uruk and The
Littoral Zone.
“Do you think there’s too much archaeology? Too many people need to dig
things up and find them out. It’s not necessary to some people and more
than necessary for others. There’s an industry around it ... It’s the
doing that’s important, not the knowing about the doing. Because that’s
second. So, obviously some poets are more articulate than others, but
articulacy can hide things ... There’s a lot about, sounds impressive
but misses the point, floundering around. Maybe that’s not what you
should be looking at. So I’m not really interested in an archaeology of
understanding...”
Ralph Hawkins, from an interview with Ian Davidson
"Ralph Hawkins’ poems always give the impression of turning up late and
being drunk when they do arrive. They minimize the gap of 'constructive
effort' between the basic seeking of pleasure and pleasurable
sensations, and the “mediated” pleasure of the poem. […]
He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a
series of 'direct experiences' from whose course we could work out the
shape of the self experiencing them. We could either take the
individual events and fit them into our own self-experience, or we
could take each book as constructing a new 'shell self', a role we can
both play for a while. Hawkins is not asking how experience happens,
but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway.
The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off,
jumping between planes; Hawkins’ method is to eliminate whatever is not
interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting,
polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. We could
describe his work as anarchistic, because it does not confirm any of
the classificatory and causal judgments of our law-abiding society, and
experiences absolutely no urge to replace these with a new set of rules
and values."
Andrew Duncan, from Secrets of Nature (Salt, forthcoming)
and also amazon.co.uk:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0907562426/qid=1081095215/
sr=1-28/ref=sr_1_0_28/202-4574791-5154233
(NB if the above address carries over to a second line, you will need
to cut-and-paste the whole thing as far as 5154233.)
Also coming soon:
Kelvin Corcoran: New and Selected Poems
John Welch: The Eastern Boroughs
Lee Harwood: Collected Poems
My apologies to any who receive more than one copy of this announcement.
Tony Frazer
___________________________________
Tony Frazer
Shearsman Books Ltd
58 Velwell Road
Exeter EX4 4LD
England
Tel / Fax: (+44) (0) 1392-434511
http://www.shearsman.com/
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